The Aarhus Story

Aarhus Fortæller is a new permanent museum of 800 square meters in the Old Town of Aarhus. The museum tells the city’s history from the Viking Age to the present – and uses a modern implementation of narrative tales and interactivity. No Parking has delivered 5 installations for the new museum.

For the museum’s Renaissance section, we have made a Customs Game where one has to demand customs from farmers and people, who are heading into town with merchandise. The game is designed in a youthful comic style with fun sound effects, rewarding with sounding coins for every product you tax. The goal is to earn 200 kronor within the game’s short period of time.

In the same room, No Parking has made an interactive projection of an 17th century Merchant Family, which can be interacted with through an interactive slider. When you move the handle on the sliders axis to one of the beat points, the projection responds and tells about the given event. The displayed films were produced with talented actors in a film studio, and digitally manipulated to match the actual museum scenography.

For the section about Aarhus in the 20th century, we have made a wall of interactive portraits, which can be activated via tactile buttons. Here you can hear the manufacturer tell about the work at the factory, the worker about his attitude towards capitalism, or the prostitute about her terms. When the individual persons tell their story, the other portraits listen, and sometimes interfere with what is being said. No Parking has used professional actors and made sure their lines of vision fit, to create a credible experience of the images interacting with each other.

In the museum’s modern section we have made a container game for children, where you have to make sure that you load a container ship correctly. If you do not distribute the weight of the different weighing containers correctly to the ship, you may risk the ship rolling around and losing the loaded containers. To complete the game, the weight must be distributing correctly on the ship’s deck. No Parking has designed and built a physical interface with 2 handles, to create a tactile and realistic feeling of being a crane operator.